Q3 Internet Advertising Revenues Released

Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP announced Internet Advertising Revenues for the third quarter yesterday. Q3 Internet advertising revenues were approximately $5.5 billion, 5.5% less than the same period last year but 1.7% more than Q2 2009. In the context of reduced overall ad spending, this means that digital media is capturing a larger piece of marketers’ total advertising spend.

Firefox Breaks 50% Market Share In Eastern Europe

GemiusRanking PL, a Polish Internet research firm, recently published aggregated information on Internet users' web site behavior and computer technical characteristics for the countries of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Russia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine.   This data set is showing that Firefox now for the first time has over 50% of the browser share in these countries. [Via Mozilla Metrics Blog]

Dell Q3 Profits Are Still Down 54% Vs. One Year Ago

Dell profits were actually up slightly from the second quarter, at $12.9 billion up from $12.8 billion.  But Q3 net income was 54% down from Q3 last year ($337 million, down from $727 million). Large enterprise and SMB revenues were up slightly from the last quarter (the first time this has happened in almost two years).  Dell is hoping like crazy that businesses buy high end PCs to run Windows 7 in the fourth quarter.  There's a good chance of a PC price war, however, with all manufacturers ...

American Express Acquires Revolution Money For $300 Million

American Express announced today that, subject to regulatory approval, it will be acquiring PayPal competitor Revolution Money for $300 million. Revolution Money was founded by Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, in 2005. Besides the online payment and money exchange business, the company also offers Revolution  Card, a secure credit/debit card which is primarily issued as a private label card by chain stores and gas station chains. It looks like AmEx is gaining a foothold into an interne...

Nokia Rumored To Be Planning Takeover Of Palm Inc.

Although there's no official word, rumors that Nokia is planning on acquiring Palm Inc. supposedly sent shares of Palm up 8% today. This rumor's been popping up from time to time for months -buying Palm would give Nokia the Pre, Pixi and probably most importantly - WebOS. and Nokia apparently has the cash, over $9 billion - more than enough to finance a takeover.

Intel Settles Anti-Trust Suit With AMD

Intel's had a heap of legal trouble lately, and although they maintain that they've never acted in a monopolistic or anti-competitive fashion - it sounds at this point like basically nobody on the planet is agreeing with them. Which is probably why Intel announced today that it will pay AMD $1.25 billion and has agreed to abide by a set of new business practice restrictions to settle lawsuits brought by the rival chip maker. AMD seems more than pleased with the results.  CEO Dirk Mey...

Google Aquires Admob For $750 Million

Google announced today that it has acquired mobile display ad platform, Admob.  The company specializes in mobile display ads, served in websites viewed on mobile browsers as well as in downloaded games and applications.  Their primary market and greatest success to date has been on the iPhone, but the company also recently launched an Android ad platform. With AdMob, Google will also be acquiring a suite of mobile tools including their ad marketplace, analytics and metric tracking.  Acce...

Rupert Murdoch Would Like To Abolish “Fair Use”, Remove All News Corp. Content From Search

News Corp founder and CEO Rupert Murdoch announced via his Sky News Network that he believes that the doctrine of Fair Use could be challenged in court and “barred altogether”, and that he is open in the future to removing News Corp content from Google in a bid to start charging directly for content on the Internet. Asked why News Corp. hasn’t already  made its sites invisible to Google and other search engines (easily done, through robots.txt), Murdoch replied: “I think we will….but that...

Ebay Settles Lawsuit With Skype Founders; Spinoff Of Company Moving Forward

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype who sold the company to Ebay in 2005 for $2.6 billion had recently been holding up the resale of the company with lawsuits charging that IP central to the internet telephony service was owned by another of their companies, Joltid - and that Skype owed Joltid licensing fees. These lawsuits were settled today by Ebay, who agreed with Zennström and Friis to give them a 14 percent stake in their old company, which will now completely own the...

Verizon’s New Prepaid Wireless Data Service for Laptop Users is a Rip…

This is one of those news items where you just imagine a conference room somewhere with a bunch of stuffed shirts and one guy says "I know!  We'll give them less and charge them more!" and everybody pats each other on the back for a job well done. Enter Verizon's new pre-paid wireless "deal". $15 a day to access 75 megabytes of data. OR... $30 a week for 250 MB of data. OR $50 a month for 500 MB  of data. (All the new services will be bundled with the Verizon Wireless USB760... no data here...

Microsoft to Cut 800 More Jobs on top of 5,000 Already Planned

CNN is reporting that Microsoft announced today that it will be cutting 800 more jobs in addition to the 5,000 that it announced it would be cutting earlier this year. These job cuts will be spread across various locations and business units, but the company would not state when exactly they would go into effect. This is the first mass job-cut announcement in Microsoft's 34-year history as a company.